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milbournosphere writes "It looks like Steve drew up an idea for an ad-supported OS. A patent was filed back in 2009 detailing how it was done. From the article: 'Rather than charge the normal upgrade price, which in those days was $99, he was thinking of shipping a second version of Mac OS 9 that would be given away for free — but would be supported instead by advertising. The theory was that this would pull in a ton of people who didn't normally upgrade because of the price, but Apple would still generate income through the advertising. And any time an owner of the free version wanted to get rid of the advertising, he or she could simply pay for the ad-free version. Steve's team had worked out the preliminary numbers the concept seemed financially sound.'"

That's a classic bait n' switch. How usable would an OS that pops ads all the time be? What if, after installing, they upped the ad frequency etc? Would the ads be embedded or fetched over the network? Could you downgrade to your previously legally obtained, ad-free, OS without losing all your work?

This isn't an Apple bash or even a Steve Jobs bash. That idea is pure, unadulterated, marketing evilness.

As the owner of an ad-supported Kindle, I couldn't disagree more. The only ads are at the bottom of the main menu screen (where all of the available books in your library are listed) and the "screen saver". Totally unobtrusive.

It's no different to the current model offered by a lot of software, especially in the mobile space, where a paid-for ad-free app exists in parallel with its almost-identical free version that only differs by showing ads. The only difference I see is that it applies to the whole OS instead of just a single app.

It's also similar to the TV model - watch the show for free over the air with ads in the middle or wait and buy the DVD.

>>>see their Kindle sitting there with a Visa ad on the front, it makes me feel nauseous.

Wow.You're weird. A still photo of the Visa card makes you sick??? Ridiculous. Besides the ads are actually more entertaining than the non-ad version (boring & very repetitive screensavers of authors). At least the ads gave me ~$70 on initial purchase, plus another $10 in free gift cards.

Advertising has also given me ~40 years of free television, 30 years of free talk or musicradio, free webpages instead of paypages, cheap $1 magazines, and so on. Free is better than spending ~$5000 a year to get the same level of service. (IMHO)

I'm hoping that Apple applied for the patent just to block Google from ever doing it. Jobs might have conceived of it, but he had the wisdom not to do it and now the idea sounds like something much more likely to get deployed by Google than Apple.